H-Diplo Review Essay 131 on Wenge Qian De Deng Xiaoping: Mao

H-Diplo H-Diplo Review Essay 131 on Wenge qian de Deng Xiaoping: Mao Zedong de “fu shuai,” 1956-1966 [Deng Xiaoping before the Cultural Revolution: Mao’s “Vice Marshal,” 1956-1966] [17 June 2015]

Discussion published by George Fujii on Wednesday, June 17, 2015

H-Diplo Essay No. 131 An H-Diplo Review Essay Published to the H-Net Commons on 17 June 2015, and accurate as of that date

H-Diplo Essay Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse H-Diplo Web and Production Editor: George Fujii Commissioned for H-Diplo by Thomas Maddux

Yen-lin Chung. Wenge qian de Deng Xiaoping: Mao Zedong de “fu shuai,” 1956-1966 [Deng Xiaoping before the Cultural Revolution: Mao’s “Vice Marshal,” 1956-1966]. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2013.

URL: http://tiny.cc/E131

Essay by Yafeng Xia, Long Island University, Brooklyn

Starting two decades after Deng Xiaoping (China’s paramount leader from the late 1970s to the early 1990s) came to political preeminence in the late 1970s, a good number of biographies have also appeared in English — from the New York Times reporter Harrison E. Salisbury (1992); Ruan Ming (1994), who was an associate of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Hu Yaobang in the early 1980s; former U.K. ambassador to ChinaRichard Evans (1994); the Harvard-trained Chinese historian Benjamin Yang (1998), who claimed to know Deng’s sons personally; the meticulous U.S. analyst Michael Marti (2002). But Harvard scholar Ezra Vogel’s (2011) can be regarded as the most comprehensive and informative of the lot to today. Vogel’s is a substantial study [1] but it deals almost entirely with Deng’s career after the Cultural Revolution – the Deng era.

More recently, the British scholar Michael Dillon (2015) published a biography of Deng Xiaoping that was based on some of the new sources available after Vogel’s book was published. He attempts a [2] more balanced assessment of Deng’s life than Vogel’s Oxford University Press is publishing a new biography of Deng based on newly discovered documents, especially in Russian archives by the [3] Russian scholar Alexander V. Pantsov. The authors Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine claim that theirs is an objective, balanced, and unprecedentedly rich biography of Deng. It has become a mini cottage industry to write and publish on Deng Xiaoping, who has been regarded as China’s great reformer.

Until recently the accounts of Deng’s life published in China in Chinese have been political. The purpose of those publications is to assign him the right place in the pantheon of the Chinese Communist Party. These publications focus on Deng’s revolutionary career prior to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, or on Deng’s later career in the reform and opening-up era. For instance, Deng Rong, Deng Xiaoping’s youngest daughter, recalls her father’s revolutionary [4] careers prior to 1949 and also during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 in two volumes. But what was going on in his political life in the years from 1956 to 1966 when Deng Xiaoping was General Secretary of the CCP? The Chinese scholarship has glossed over this important part in Deng’s life.

The book under review fills this void in the historiography of Deng Xiaoping. Yen-lin Chung, an assistant professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan has dug into all presently available sources in mainland China, in particular, the holdings in Guangdong provincial archives of speeches of central party and government officials including Deng Xiaoping before the Cultural Revolution. He has also tracked down documentary sources on the CCP in overseas archives and collections, such as the digital archive of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and, among others, collections at Taiwan’s Academia Historica. On basis of this rich documentation, Chung offers a critical assessment of Deng’s role in the CCP’s ‘rectification’ movement and anti-rightist movement in 1957, anti-dogmatism in the military in 1958, the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1960, the ‘anti- right opportunist campaign’ after the Lushan Conference in 1959, the Sino-Soviet split in the early 1960s, and the ‘four clean-ups’ campaign in 1964.

From the mid-1930s to the 1960s, Deng was Mao Zedong’s protégé and strong supporter. Mao achieved political supremacy in the CCP in 1935 and remained as the paramount leader of Communist China under his death in 1976. As CCP General Secretary, Deng was Mao’s henchman, and Mao considered Deng as one of the candidates to succeed him. While attending the World Communist and Workers’ Parties Conference in Moscow in November 1957, Mao talked with Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, about the CCP senior leaders. Khrushchev recalled, “The only one of his comrades whom Mao seemed to approve of was Teng Hsiao-ping (Deng Xiaoping). I remember Mao pointing out Teng to me and saying, ‘See that [5] little man there? He’s highly intelligent and has a great future ahead of him.’” At the Seven Plenary of the Eighth CCP Congress in April 1959, Mao Zedong said, “Power is centralized in the [Politiburo] Standing Committee and Secretariat. My name is Mao Zedong. I am in control, that’s to say I'm Commander in Chief. Deng Xiaoping is [my] deputy and is Deputy Commander in Chief. One of us is [6] the Commander and the other is the Deputy.” During these years, Deng actively carried out Mao’s radical policies in anti-rightist movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Sino-Soviet split, and was indispensable to him. Chung concludes, “Mao was in charge, and Deng effectively carried out Mao’s policies.” (p. 448)

In addition to its introduction and conclusion, the book consists of seven main chapters. In Chapter One, Chung explores the historical background of Deng’s rise to become General Secretary of the [7] CCP in 1956. He argues that after the fall of Gao Gang, Mao decided to groom Deng as a candidate for the top position. Mao noted that Deng was impartial and very capable. At the First Plenum of the Eighth Congress of the CCP, with Mao’s blessing Deng was elected a member of the Standing Committee and General Sectary of the CCP Central Committee in September 1956. Although he ranked No. 6 in the CCP hierarchy, he was in charge of the CCP Central Committee Secretariat, having overall responsibilities on party, government and military affairs. Deng’s actual power was higher than that of Premier Zhou Enlai after the beginning of the Great Leap Forward in 1958.

Chapter two examines Deng’s role in the ‘rectification’ movement and ‘anti-rightist’ movement. During the preparatory stage of the ‘rectification’ campaign, Deng gave a long report on 12 January 1957 at Tsinghua University to over ten thousand students and faculty members, elaborating the CCP’s view and positions on the Hungarian Incident of October 1956 and other international issues, defending the CCP’s policy on the ownership of the means of production, and democracy and dictatorship, and the CCP’s attitude toward the Soviet Union. (75) Deng participated in revising Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) editorials on rectification, strengthening Renmin ribao’s role in the political campaign. (78-79) Deng was aware of Mao’s stratagem of ‘luring a snake out of hiding’ from the very beginning – encouraging the intellectuals to criticize the party and then purging them. Deng played a more active and important role in implementing Mao’s anti-rightist policy than Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s Number 2 and Premier Zhou Enlai. (145) Mao was quite satisfied with Deng’s performance. In 1980, Deng admitted that he made mistakes in carrying out anti-rightist policy. But Deng insisted that the anti-rightist struggle in 1957 was not wrong in itself, and that the problem was that its scope [8] was unduly broadened.

Relying primarily on published sources in mainland China, Chapter Three examines Deng’s role in the ‘anti-dogmatism campaign’ in the military. The key targets of the campaign were two renowned military leaders – Marshal Liu Baocheng, who was then president of Nanjing Military Academy, and General Su Yu, who was then Chief of General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Chung argues that Deng played more important role than Defense Minister Peng Dehuai in the army’s rectification movement. Although Deng should be held responsible for carrying the army’s rectification movement to its excesses, he was able to mitigate Mao and Peng’s criticism of Liu Bocheng, who had been the commander of the CCP army (the Liu-Deng army) when Deng served as political commissar from 1937 to 1949. (184-90) But Deng showed no mercy toward Su Yu.(160-63) This reflects Deng’s humanness in political life.

Chapters Five and Six discuss Deng’s role in the Great Leap Forward. Among the top leaders, Deng was the most conspicuous in siding with Mao to push for radical policies in 1958. On several occasions, Deng acted as Mao’s representative and was referred to by Mao as ‘boss number two’ and ‘deputy commander in chief at the party headquarters.’ Two decades later, under new political

Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Review Essay 131 on Wenge qian de Deng Xiaoping: Mao Zedong de “fu shuai,” 1956-1966 [Deng Xiaoping before the Cultural Revolution: Mao’s “Vice Marshal,” 1956-1966] [17 June 2015]. H-Diplo. 06-17-2015. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/72537/h-diplo-review-essay-131-wenge-qian-de-deng-xiaoping-mao-zedong-de- Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-Diplo circumstances, Deng had to review the Great Leap Forward and his own role in it. In late February 1980, Deng said, “Talking about previous mistakes, we shouldn’t just blame Comrade Mao Zedong alone. Other Party Center comrades also committed mistakes. We used to say that Comrade Mao Zedong’s head was overheated during the Great Leap Forward. What about ours? Weren’t they overheated, too? Comrades Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai and I did not object to it, nor did Comrade [9] Chen Yun speak out.” In fact it is Liu, Zhou, and Chen who were repeatedly criticized by Mao for their “conservatism” and “rightist tendencies” from 1953 up until early 1958. They did try to speak out while Deng consistently stood by Mao. Two decades later, Deng was still evasive regarding his true role in the Great Leap Forward. He defended Mao, and, in fact, himself.

Deng was also responsible for the CCP’s relations with other Communist and Socialist parties from 1956 to 1966, while Zhou Enlai and Foreign Minister Chen Yi were in charge of state-to-state relations. Chapter Six discusses Deng’s role in the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s and the CCP’s relations with Southeast Asian Communist parties. As the CCP’s “deputy commander in chief,” Deng oversaw not only domestic affairs, but also the CCP’s external affairs. During the Sino-Soviet great polemics in the 1960s, Deng was also in charge of an anti-revisionist documents and manuscripts writing squad, a dozen Russian specialists and Marxist scholars who produced nine highly confrontational articles from September 1963 to July 1964. These polemical articles not only condemned Khrushchev, but also claimed that the Soviet Union had degenerated into a country of [10] “social imperialism.” Deng’s performance during the years of the Sino-Soviet split would play a crucial role in determining his political fate and his relations with Mao. Vilified as the “number-two person in authority pursuing the capitalist road,” (445) Deng was purged by Mao at the beginning of the Great Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). But he was treated much more leniently than Liu Shaoqi, China’s second most important leader from 1949 to 1966, who died in disgrace in 1969. Deng’s rehabilitation in early 1973 had much do with the fact that Deng was Mao’s long-time protégé and ‘anti-Soviet revisionist’ hero.

In Chapter Seven, Chung argues that Mao purged Deng during the Cultural Revolution because Deng failed to keep in step with Mao in the wake of the disastrous Great Leap Forward. It was true that Deng’s relationship with Mao started to change after 1959. As the first line leaders, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping carried out more practical measures to rectify radical policies and jettison the excessive practices in agriculture and industry in the early 1960s. At the Seventh Plenum of the Third Communist Youth League on 7 July 1962, Deng Xiaoping first uttered the famous line, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is yellow or black as long as it catches the mouse.” When the phrase was published, [11] the cat’s color was changed from yellow to white. Mao was obviously upset, and concerned that Deng was moving closer to Liu in supporting more practical economic policies, such as single- household responsibility system in the countryside. Mao complained in October 1966, “From 1959 up to the present time, Deng has never come to see me about anything. Deng is a deaf man, but whenever he was at a conference, he always chose to sit in a spot far from mine. He respected me but [12] kept away from me, treating me like a dead ancestor.”

In the concluding chapter, Chung attempts to discuss to what extent Deng’s various positions and responsibilities before the Cultural Revolution affected his reform and opening-up program after 1978. He argues that many of Deng’s policies during the reform and opening-up originated from his political experiences and lessons learned from the 1956-1966 period, for example, eliminating ‘class struggle’ as the key of China’s domestic policy, defining economic construction as the focus of China’s domestic policy, taking the development of productivity as the first task of socialism, and shifting from planned economy to market economy.

Overall, this is an important book on Deng Xiaoping, which offers a balanced analysis of Deng’s political life from 1956 to 1966. Ezra Vogel’s book focuses on Deng’s career as China’s great reformer, and Vogel tends to sing Deng’s praises and remains reticent when Deng’s record was tainted. Vogel’s Deng is always “realistic” and “pragmatic.” Chung offers a cold-headed analysis of Deng’s role and motives at important historical junctures, and attempts to uncover the historical truth about Deng. We get a clearer image of Deng in those years from this book. Thus, the book deserves the attention of all those who are interested in twentieth-century Chinese history in general, and Deng Xiaoping in particular.

Yafeng Xia is professor of history at Long Island University, Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks during the Cold War, 1949-72 (2006), coauthor of Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History (2015), and Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1960-1973: A New History (2016). He has also published many articles on Cold War history. He is at work on a book project, tentatively entitled, “Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949-1976: A New History.”

Notes

[1] Harrison Salisbury, The New Emperor: China in the Eras of Mao and Deng (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1982); Richard Evans, Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China (Rev. ed. New York, 1997); Benjamin Yang, Deng Xiaoping: A Political Biography (New York: M. E. Sharpe Inc., 1998); Ruan Ming, Deng Xiaoping: Chronicle of an Empire (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994); Michael E. Marti, China and the Legacy of Deng Xiaoping: From Communist Revolution to Capitalist Evolution

(Potomac Books, 2002); Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2011).

[2] Michael Dillon, Deng Xiaoping: The Man Who Made Modern China (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015).

[3] Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine,Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life (New York, Oxford University Press, 2015).

[4] Deng Xiaoping’s youngest daughter Deng Rong (Maomao) published two volumes about her father life prior to 1949. See Maomao, Wode fuqin Deng Xiaoping [My Father Deng Xiaoping] (Beijing: Zhongyang Wenxian Chubanshe, 1993). This volume has been translated into English Deng Maomao, Deng Xiaoping: My Father (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Maomao’s second volume is on Deng Xiaoping in the Cultural Revolution. See Maomao, Wo de fuqin Deng Xiaoping: “Wenge” shuiyue [My Father Deng Xiaoping during the Cultural Revolution] (Beijing: Zhongyang Wenxian Chubanshe, 2000). For an English version of this volume, see Rong Deng,Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution: A Daughter Recalls the Critical Years (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 2002).

[5] Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament(trans. by Strobe Talbott) (Boston:

Little, Brown and Company, 1974), 253; Liu Jintian,Zouchu guomen de Deng Xiaoping [Deng Xiaoping

Traveling Abroad] (Shijiazhuang: Hebei Renmin Chubanshe, 2001), 83.

[6] See Li Rui, Da yuejin qinliji [Eye-witness account of the Great Leap Forward] (Haikou: Nanfang Chubanshe, 1999), 465-66.

[7] Gao Gang was a high-ranking CCP leader during the Chinese Civil War and the early years of the People’s Republic of China. He was dramatically promoted in the final years of the civil war to become the Party, State and military head of the key Northeast area of China. He was a Politburo member and a vice chairman of the Central People’s Government. Gao was purged and committed suicide in 1954.

[8] Deng Xiaoping wenxuan [Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping] (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1995), vol. 2, 255-74.

[9] Deng Xiaoping wenxuan, vol.2, 255-74.

[10] For details, see Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia, “Jockeying for Leadership: Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, October 1961-July 1964,” The Journal of Cold War Studies 16:1 (Winter 2014), 24-60.

[11] Ruan, Deng Xiaoping, 4-5.

[12] Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (Beijing, 1967), vol. 2, 655-61.